Gesualdo: The Not-So-Mad Prince
Venosa is a town in southern Italy a hundred miles east of Naples and seventy-five miles west of Bari. It is in the province of Potenza (or potency), and in Roman times, when it was a stopover on the Appian Way, it was called Venusia (or Venusberg, if you prefer). It is situated in a deep ravine on the east side of Monte Vulture--and I hope all these life-and-death names aren't just sliding past you! If you go there, you might bunk down in the ruined castle, which had stabling for 150 horses; I don't know where else you'd find accommodation, since Michelin lists neither albergo nor ristorante. What I'm trying to suggest is that Venosa is poor, isolated, and godforsaken. I've never been there myself, but we once made the mistake of taking what looked like a shortcut from Pescara to Naples by way of the Abruzzi. It's the kind of world that could drive a sensitive person up the wall.
I suspect that Don Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa was a sensitive person, though his portrait doesn't give much of a key; it shows (in profile) short, wayward blond hair, rather puffy cheeks and throat, a long and delicate nose, full lips, a meditative eye, a slight overbite, a small mustache that terminates in bristling ends, and a rounded chin from which a tiny goatee extends quite horizontally. One would guess him to have been a quiet young man who got straight A's in math and chemistry and perhaps taught Sunday school. The standard biography by Cecil Gray and Philip Heseltine ("Peter Warlock") is subtitled Prince and Murderer, and there are still those who would have us believe that he was mad--a notion bolstered by that fact that earlier ages could make no sense of his music.
There was a murder, to be sure--of his first wife (a cousin whose fourth husband Don Carlo was) and her lover, caught in flagrante delicto in a palace bed. He probably had her baby done away with too, out of fear that the Venosan line was tainted. We may find such things shocking in our gentle times, but quick justice meted out by poison or the sword was not unheard of in the high places of Renaissance Italy. There seems no reason to assume that Gesualdo went mad with guilt: three years later he was arranging a new marriage, and if it was not a very happy one, what else is new?
Nor is personal suffering the only--or even the most likely--reason for the intense emotionalism of his music. The music is clearly a phenomenon of that turn-of-the-century manneristic outburst that produced Monteverdi, Schutz, El Greco, Tintoretto, Donne, Gongora, and Bernini. Moreover, Gesualdo finds himself at a turning-point in musical history, between the old madrigalism with its word-painting and the new homophony with its concern with rendering "real" emotion. Despite Venosa, Gesualdo got around; he knew the best musicians and poets in Italy, and some would have it that Peri and Monteverdi learned the operatic tricks from him. What marks his music is an unbearable intensity of feeling, and a chromaticism that was not caught up with until Wagner came along!
To judge from the reprintings, the madrigals were popular in their time, and they have regained their place today. Some years ago MHS made available the first three books of the complete Arcophon recording, but for some reason did not follow up. The sacred music, which is of equal interest, has heretofore appeared only in snippets. (It was interesting enough to inspire Igor Stravinsky to rewrite the missing parts of some pieces!) It is reassuring to see this survey entrusted to the Deller group (which has dipped into the material before), and it will be interesting to compare Gesualdo's setting of the Holy Week music with that of his passionate contemporary, Tomas Luis de Victoria.
